This is my experience as well. And unfortunately, many of my teachers feed into this. "Ok kids, today we're going to learn this new formula. You put a number in, do some arithmetic, and you get an answer out. I am not going to bother explaining the importance of this formula, how it came into existence, nor its practical application — likely because even I don't know. But what I do know is it's important because everyone says it is and it will be on the exam. Now get cracking." A parody of course, but I say captures the sentiment which completely drained my desire to learn math. I got good grades, but only after I learned to accept that it is futile to learn the importance of what I am learning and instead simply focus on rote memorization of solving the problem, even if I don't know why it works.

There is truth in this, but even then, to apply the formulas to many problems, you need to have seriously strong pattern recognition abilities, and the capacity and flexibility to adapt what you know to the given situation. Then piping the right thing into the other right things requires a deeper understanding, not always of what the thing very nature, but at least what it does, and what's it compatible with.

This means loading the entire problem space in your head.

And this is hard.

Sounds like great preparation for Leetcode interviews ;)